The creators of those arcade games made the ROM images free.
There was a Starroms company that sold the Atari arcade ROMs for a price. But they went out of business.
I'm sorry your ROMs you helped make are pirated all over the Internet. In some places they are archived like at the Internet Archive. https://archive.org/details/messmame
It is like a museum that tries to save the older tech stuff that few people care about. Once JSMAME is finished the arcade games will run in a web browser.
I want to thank you for making these classic arcade games and say sorry that people pirate your work, but MAME does not distribute ROMs it is select websites on the Internet and BitTorrent sites as well that distribute them.
MAME assumes that the user has access to the arcade game and dumped the ROM themselves because they legally own it. But in truth most people just pirate the ROMs, and I wanted to be honest about that.
I think his point was that if most pirate the ROMs, why bother with relicensing the source - just redistribute that without appropriate licensing, too.
Both are the work of developers, both are used by all users of MAME.
I am willing to bet that effectively every single MAME developer has pirated one or more ROMs at one point. Infringement is infringement. The "they don't distribute it with ROMs" is a red herring if those same people are themselves pirating ROMs.
In order to make the game work, they need the ROM and/or CHD file. I doubt every developer has gotten the rights to license the ROM etc and just pirated it to get it to work.
In the late 1990s people used to earn money selling MAME CDs with the ROMs on them. People thought they were getting legit ROMs, but it was just more pirating.
StarROMS sold some Atari ROMs and I think it was legit but they got shut down.
If only there was some sort of system that sells ROMs legally and gets permission to sell the ROMs and build it into MAME or MESS so each ROM or Floppy can be bought and the original ROM developers make money from the sales. But such a system isn't in place so most get their ROMs via piracy.
My feeling is they should remember that they are still handling pirated material - even though using it these days might as well be considered a zero risk.
With the future open-sourcing of MAME this stuff will be everywhere. And, unless you're playing Roto or Gridlee, you're most certainly handling pirated material. Doesn't matter if it's on your local hard drive or archive.org.
http://mamedev.org/legal.html
It depends on the country if downloading the ROMs or Disk Images is legal or not.
Some of the ROMs to released for free for use with MAME: http://mamedev.org/roms/
The creators of those arcade games made the ROM images free.
There was a Starroms company that sold the Atari arcade ROMs for a price. But they went out of business.
I'm sorry your ROMs you helped make are pirated all over the Internet. In some places they are archived like at the Internet Archive. https://archive.org/details/messmame
It is like a museum that tries to save the older tech stuff that few people care about. Once JSMAME is finished the arcade games will run in a web browser.
I want to thank you for making these classic arcade games and say sorry that people pirate your work, but MAME does not distribute ROMs it is select websites on the Internet and BitTorrent sites as well that distribute them.
MAME assumes that the user has access to the arcade game and dumped the ROM themselves because they legally own it. But in truth most people just pirate the ROMs, and I wanted to be honest about that.